A Tenuous Legislative Consensus in Minnesota Has Collapsed Over Tax Increases

Sunday

May 20, 2007 at 6:32 AM

With a legislative session in its final days, the vaunted rise of the political middle has taken it on the kisser.

KIRK JOHNSON

ST. PAUL, May 16 — John Berns and John Benson were swept into the Minnesota State Legislature last fall in a midterm election that promised an end to the state’s polarized partisan politics.

Their adjoining State House districts west of Minneapolis are much alike — fiscally conservative, socially moderate-to-liberal — and the two men tended to vote alike too, each crossing party lines to support moderate positions on bread-and-butter issues like education and the environment.

But with the legislative session now in its final days, Mr. Berns, a Republican, and Mr. Benson, a Democrat, say the vaunted rise of the political middle has taken it on the kisser. The legislative consensus, a tenuous bridge of middle-ground Democrats and Republicans, has collapsed over tax increases on the wealthy, college tuition incentives for illegal immigrants and raising the state’s gasoline tax.

“This whole session is about who can hold onto that pivot vote in the middle, and now no one has it,” said Lawrence R. Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota.

Moderates like Mr. Berns and Mr. Benson have been the losers.

Mr. Berns frets that by voting with the Republican minority he will be accused in the next election of doing nothing but blocking the way by saying no. Mr. Benson worries that Democratic moderates will be vulnerable to accusations that they were ineffectual bystanders who could not make their voices heard.

“I’m an idealist, like a lot of these liberals,” said Mr. Benson, a bookish 63-year-old retired social studies teacher who sprinkles his conversation with quotes from Teddy Roosevelt and Will Rogers. “But I’m also a pragmatist, and I’m interested in actually getting something done, and I don’t see the logic, other than political value I suppose, of shoving things under the governor’s nose one after another, all of which are going to be vetoed and we can’t override.”

Mr. Berns, a boyish and exuberant 35-year-old lawyer with three children at home under the age of 7, struck an equally wistful note in an interview at his office at the Capitol. “Why can’t we just pare down a little bit and make incremental progress?” he said. “I think that taxpayers would accept that.”

Professor Jacobs said the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, frustrated by years of cuts to social programs that have long defined Minnesota’s progressive reputation, went too far too fast after taking control of the House of Representatives last fall, scaring moderate Republicans back into party unity, and bruising moderate Democrats crucial to the majority’s success.

“The Democrats won a majority but they didn’t win a liberal Democratic majority,” he said. “They misread the election.”

And the Democrats’ legislative plans for more taxes and spending in turn appear to have bolstered the fortunes of Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican who has brought his party charging back to the political right — perhaps to fuel ambitions for national office, many people at the Capitol say — with sweeping vetoes that have dismissed much of the Legislature’s work as liberal over-reaching.

Mr. Pawlenty, who won a second term in November by only 21,000 votes out of 2.2 million cast, has seen his popularity soar recently, with a 55 percent approval rating earlier this month as he stood up to the Legislature, according to a poll by Minnesota Public Radio.

The question of who stole Minnesota’s political middle deepened this week with a proposal to raise the tax on gasoline.

Raising the gas tax, which has been frozen at 20 cents a gallon since 1988, was not a liberal vanguard position, but in fact a centerpiece campaign by many moderates, including Mr. Benson, who promised voters that he would work to improve a long-neglected transportation and transit system that is making commutes into the Twin Cities nightmarish from suburbs like his. And he warned voters that improvement would mean raising gasoline taxes.

Mr. Berns also promised to work on transportation, which he said ranked among the top issues for his constituents, along with education, health care and property taxes.

But by the time the votes in the House and Senate were held, many people in the Legislature say the party lines had so hardened that the moderates could end up losing even this fight. The proposal, which passed in both chambers last Monday, would raise the tax by 5 cents a gallon, with as much as 2.5 cents more added on temporarily to pay interest on borrowing for transportation bonds, and would also allow counties to raise sales taxes to pay for transportation improvements.

Mr. Benson voted yes, Mr. Berns voted no, and Mr. Pawlenty immediately vetoed the whole plan, calling it irresponsible at a time when gas prices are at an all-time high. On Wednesday, he declared at a news conference that his veto would hold.

The Democrats are five votes short of a two-thirds majority necessary for an override in the House, and one vote short in the Senate. The Republican moderates who might consider voting for a gas tax increase will stay firmly in camp when the override votes are counted, the governor said.

Democratic leaders concede that the timing of some of their ideas — including a plan, also vetoed by Mr. Pawlenty and opposed by Mr. Berns and Mr. Benson, to raise income taxes on families making over $400,000 to pay for property tax relief — might have struck some people as ill-timed at a moment when the economy is sluggish and the state has surplus money to spend.

The majority’s plan to allow illegal immigrants to pay the same tuition rates as state residents, called the Minnesota Dream Act, similarly foundered when people like Mr. Berns and Mr. Benson opposed it, and the governor threatened a veto.

But they say that after years of spending cuts by Republicans, Minnesotans voted for change, and a restoration of the things that create the state’s reputation for a high quality of life. That means more spending for education, transportation and health care, the party leaders said.

“I think what’s happened here, at least from my estimation, is that people are sick of word games about how we’re going to fund things,” said the speaker of the House of Representatives, Margaret Anderson Kelliher, Democrat of Minneapolis. “They know that at the end of the day you need to put real dollars into things that are falling apart.”

But when gasoline prices are pushing $3.25 a gallon, Ms. Kelliher said, adding another pinch to the pain is a tough sell. Lawmakers in Connecticut and Texas, by contrast, are considering actually suspending their state gas tax for this summer’s summer driving season, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group in Washington.

Meanwhile, in the western suburbs that Mr. Berns and Mr. Benson represent, some residents have been left a bit conflicted too.

“I understand the need for the tax, and I agree, but it’s frustrating when you’re budgeting a certain amount,” said Abby Forrette, a stay-at-home mother of four who lives in Plymouth, in Mr. Benson’s district. Ms. Forrette, who had one child on her hip and another by the hand as she stopped to buy a loaf of bread at a specialty shop in Minnetonka, said, “It’s just too bad the price and the tax are going up at the same time.”

Many moderates in the Legislature say the defeat of the gas tax bill, if Mr. Pawlenty’s veto cannot be overcome by the end of the Legislature’s session on Monday, could have profound consequences for Minnesota’s economic life, as traffic problems worsen and other cities develop ambitions transportation plans, and on its political life, as hope fades for a broad middle that can support ambitious civic projects.

“The governor has set this bar, and that’s where he’s at, so do you try to find votes to override him? That’s really hard to do, frankly,” said Mr. Berns, the Republican. But not getting the two-thirds over the override also means failure of another sort, he added. “I think everybody wants to get something done.”

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